THE E-SHOPPER.

Bowl tickets? No problem, but you'll pay

So your favorite team just claimed a berth in one of college football's top bowl games. What are you going to do next?

You're going online, of course.

As if December weren't already fraught with shopping madness, fans of dozens of colleges whose teams will be playing over the holidays--preferably in a marquee game somewhere in the Sun Belt--are scrambling to come up with the connections and the cash that will land them in the stadium.

Many could have avoided this predicament and been assured of choice bowl-game seats by purchasing their team's season tickets. But for fans who lacked such foresight, the Web provides a number of ways for ticket sellers and ticket buyers to find one another.

Your shopping may take you to city-specific online bazaars like Craigslist.org, the auction domain of eBay, or dedicated ticket marketplaces like StubHub.com or TicketsNow.com.

Wherever you start, just eliminate the words "face value" from your vocabulary. "There is NO direct relation," notes a disclaimer at TicketsNow, between "the price listed on our Web site and the price printed on the ticket."

And how. For evidence, you need look no further than the Orange Bowl game on Jan. 4 in Miami, matching No. 1 Southern California against No. 2 Oklahoma. Because the Orange Bowl was designated more than a year ago as this season's national championship game, tickets have been officially sold out for weeks. Many were guaranteed to those who bought tickets to last year's (non-championship) game.

"Buying a ticket to a national championship game shouldn't be easy," said Joe Hornstein, media relations manager for the Orange Bowl Committee. Online, though, there is certainly a market, with prices reflecting both the game's stakes and the potential profits to be had by ticket-holders who may never have planned to attend.

1,300 Orange Bowl tickets

In the tidy, efficient marketplace that is StubHub, whose sellers include both individuals and ticket agencies, there were more than 200 sellers on Tuesday offering a total of nearly 1,300 Orange Bowl tickets. A number were in lots of up to 20 tickets together. (Sites like StubHub and TicketsNow hold no tickets themselves, but merely serve as a mechanism for buyers and sellers to connect and provide some guarantees, taking fees from both sides to manage the transaction.)

Sorting by price on StubHub quickly allows you to establish a high and low end (from $2,942 each for two club-level seats on the 50-yard line, down to a mere $353 for a single ticket in the corner of the upper deck). Sorting by location can expose potential inconsistencies in pricing (seats for $2,059 in Row 19 on the 25-yard line, but others for $1,765 one row lower--hmm, a potential bargain?).

That $2,059 price, by the way, is not so arbitrary as it might sound. StubHub charges sellers a 15 percent fee, so the ticket-holder was apparently looking to clear $1,750 per seat. Less obvious is how that $1,750 relates to the face value of the ticket, $195. Given Florida's tough scalping laws, which restrict the markup on resale of a ticket to $1, how do you get to four figures?

For one thing, the seller may not be in Florida. In addition, so long as the tickets are offered as part of a package with something else included, that "something else" (a hat, a parking pass) can have a premium value attached to it.

"A package can consist of anything as simple as transportation to the game," said Todd Lokken, vice president for marketing at TicketsNow, a listing service for licensed brokers that calls itself the largest online ticket marketplace. Orange Bowl seats on TicketsNow are typically packaged with a transportation voucher for taxi or limousine service to and from the stadium, he said.

But many of the Orange Bowl tickets being offered online don't specify a "package," so it's worth raising the question, if not an eyebrow, in weighing a purchase.

Prices differ game to game

If you have your eye on another game, you'll be encountering similar market forces but different price ranges. There are plenty of tickets available to top games like the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, featuring No. 3 Auburn ($195 to $1,352 on StubHub.com), and the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz. ($85 to $660).

The Rose Bowl is a different story. Because the bulk of its tickets (face value: $125) started going out only this week, the market emerged late. Many seat locations on TicketsNow and StubHub are listed as TBD, or to be determined, which doesn't keep them from being priced as high as $1,295.

Whichever game you're aiming for, there is a fundamental issue for the online ticket buyer: How do I know I'll get my ticket?

TicketsNow and StubHub guarantee that you will receive the tickets you selected (TicketsNow promises "a comparable or better ticket" or a refund).